"Reviews are too kind"
You just admitted it's not your type of game, and it's obvious here you don't have a clue either. It's not a Mario game where it's supposed to be braindead easy pick up and play with gradually increasing in difficulty levels. It's a game about momentum and understanding basic mechanics before mastering the level design.
You can always tell when a reviewer is bad at their job when they fail to actually learn the game and instead just say "Why isn't it like X?". Truth is, when you actually bother to learn to play, it actually tends to have a lot more depth, this is why I always found 2D Sonic superior to 2D Mario. 2D Mario is always really basic and the only complex part becomes the level design. Sonic has actual momentum mechanics with levels that start out complex but require more knowledge of the mechanics as the game progresses. Problem is, people try to just hold right and jump and play it like Mario, and then bitch when it doesn't actually play like Mario. Yea, no shit, you are playing a different game that's doing it's own thing, and that's perfectly fine. I see this all the time and it's why reviews for Sonic games should be largely ignored. When you see gameplay of people running through loops and into enemies and then complain about "cheap enemy placement", when the game is subtly teaching you that rolling into loops allows you to instead go faster and go through enemies, it's just kind of laughable.
But "LMAO SONIC 06 SONIC SHOULD BE DEAD" comments persist, because why on earth would people dare and just judge things of it's own product.
Also some light hypocrisy, why on earth is this game being shat on for the multiplayer, but NSMB doesn't get the same treatment? Both games are literal clusterfucks with more than one player. The only games to actually do the 4 player co op platformer right was Rayman Origins and Legends.
